This election was all about coffee.  For the first time in its history, America embraced a candidate with roots in Kenya and Hawaii.  As acts of patriotism, we can now enjoy cups of Kenyan AA  and Hawaiian Kona extra fancy and salute our new commander in chief at the same time.  The choice was clear on Tuesday, and Arabica coffee won.  I hoist my mug to our new President and give thanks for his coffee roots.

It hadn’t started out as a very auspicious morning.  The cappuccino that I drank in the café next to my hotel was like so many others I had tried in Paris all week — great foam on top, but thin, weak coffee underneath.

During SIAL, I had a conversation with a coffee professional whose opinion I thought I could trust. I had confided to him that I was having a hard time finding a decent cup of coffee in the city and he made a face. “Le café  dans les cafes a Paris, c’est un catastrophe!” (Loosely translated, he said the coffee served in cafes is a catastrophe and shouldn’t be inflicted upon anyone. And according to his expression, animals either.) But he suggested that I visit Café Soluna, since he felt it was one of the few places that I could find a cup of coffee that I would enjoy.

Café Soluna is tucked into a small space on the rue de l’hotel de Ville. This small street parallels the Seine on the right bank.  Getting there was a short walk from the Latin Quarter, walking past Notre Dame and the tiny Saint Chappelle, which has the most remarkable stained glass windows I have ever seen.

The narrow space is divided into two rooms. The front has a several small tables, a retail counter behind which are about a dozen acrylic bins containing freshly roasted coffee beans, and in the corner is a small 2-kilogram roaster that had beans cooling in the tray when my party of four entered.

The back room contains an espresso bar with stools for sitting and some comfortable chairs and tables for lounging and enjoying drinks. The coffee is fresh-roasted daily, and all of the beans come from individual plantations. I asked if it was possible to get several different press pots to try. (more…)

If nothing else, Paris is synonymous with cafés. Sitting at a table outside, sipping un expres (espresso) or cappuccino while watching the world pass by, is the quintessential Parisian experience. Pity that the coffee is so lousy. I tried two different cafés and ordered a cappuccino each time. In the first, the espresso was over-extracted and weak, but the milk was steamed fine.  In the second, the entire drink was much better, with better espresso flavor and a milk foam that was light and frothy. The price of a cappuccino sitting down is about 3.75 euros, or about $5.  French cafes have two prices for their drinks. The less expensive is for drinks ordered and consumed while standing at the bar. The second price is for drinks consumed while sitting at a table and the cost includes “rent” for the table for as long as one wants to sit.

By American standards the drinks are small. My cappuccino was about 10 ounces, served in a china cup.  With the exception of the dozen or so Starbucks in Paris, American style coffee drinks have not caught on here.  The very idea of a take-out drink seems to be anathema to the French; the size of drinks that Americans regularly consume is astonishing to locals. I tried explaining the different drink sizes to the man who installed the espresso machine that I am using at the Salon International de l’Alimentation (SIAL) trade show and his eyes got big as I translated 12-, 16-, and 24-ounce size drinks into metric. Where a standard unit of measure is a liter (about a quart), the idea of drinking three-fourths of a liter as a 24-ounce drink (700 ml here) caused his eyes to get big and his jaw to drop.  I could see he was thinking, “Crazy Americans!”

Tonight I am going to a café after dinner. I hope that my drink is better than the last few that I have had.  It’s Paris after all, home to thousands of cafés. I should be able to get a good drink in one of them.